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Oracle applications – blending cloud with on-premise

According to Oracle Corp.’s Executive Vice President of Applications Product Development, Steve Miranda, “Near 100-percent of our customers are taking different components (of their on-premise apps) and moving them to cloud piece by piece.”

What Oracle does is ensure apps are connected with tactical integrations into not just Oracle suites of cloud apps, but also third-party apps that are on-premise and/or in the cloud.

“So, you can move apps to the cloud and (have your apps) live in Oracle and third-party ecosystems,” Miranda said.

Work from scratch

All these interoperable and seamless capability is possible because Oracle had built modernised versions of their on-premise apps, ensuring that they would be supported by cloud, mobility and social capabilities, while also being whole, complete, secured and embedded with intelligence.

Oracle APAC’s VP of Applications, Adrian Johnston admitted that this had been a disruption for Oracle with work also done differently from how it used to be. For example if before, Oracle had software releases based on what it thinks is good customers, it is the other way around now.

But more crucially, Johnston views that two challenges have emerged for businesses in recent times: the speed of change of business processes, and how to apply the right level of talent to respond to the speed of change.

“There is lack of (this) talent in Asia Pacific right now,” he observed.

Momentum, nevertheless

The talent gap aside, or maybe as a result of this talent gap, start-ups want to focus on business growth, without having to worry about technology and the skills needed to manage them.

RedMart, a large Singapore supermarket, for example, has chosen Oracle’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud to fuel its growth.

RedMart’s Head of Finance, Jim Boland said, “Being a startup, business priorities tend to change quickly to respond to the competitive needs of the market.” He admitted that technology is at the heart of their business which utiltises an e-commerce platform for customers to buy groceries, household products and more. Since launching in 2011, RedMart’s growth has doubled, each year.

Oracle’s cloud-based ERP systems allows the supermarket to collaborate with suppliers over a common platform, effectively reducing costs in the long-term through better negotiation and compliance processes.

But not all businesses in this region are like RedMart. “There are different levels of maturity in moving to modern applications and investing in technology,” said Johnston who also added that despite the Southeast Asia (SEA) environment being conducive for new start-ups like RedMart, SEA also still has a large install base of legacy applications.

“Oracle believes in a hybrid, coexistence model. A lot of organisations will remain hybrid (on-premise and cloud) for many years to come, either due to regulation, internal acceptance levels or because of security or uniqueness of the organisation,” Johnston concluded.